This blog is largely deprecated, but is being preserved here for
historical interest. Check out my index page at adamfields.com for more up to
date info. My main trade is technology strategy,
process/project management, and performance optimization consulting,
with a focus on enterprise and open source CMS and related
technologies. More
information. I write periodic long pieces here, shorter stuff goes
on twitter or app.net.

11/13/2006

Over the past six months, in addition to all of the other things going on in my life, including several exciting other projects, I’ve been working as the lead architect for Confabb, a comprehensive conference portal and social networking service. It’s a testament to the magic of rails and modern business practices that we’ve been able to pull this together with an entirely distributed team, some of whom have never met each other, in our spare time, with an outlay of cash measured in hundreds of dollars. On that note, the incredible rails deployment team at EngineYard deserves our unqualified thanks.

If you’re at all interested in conferences, we should have something interesting for you. On top of the large conference database, we’ve got features to help you track conferences you’re interested in, review and rate conferences and speakers, plus some treats for speakers and conference organizers.

The application has been an interesting ride. It fills a real need, and provides solid, useful features. After 10 years of building CMS and intranet systems for clients, I’ve spent the past few years on viscerally owning the projects I’m working on. This is the first of those launches, but it’s not the last. Stay tuned in the next few months to see what else I’m working on.